It should have worked. But it’s no surprise that it didn’t.
When Brian Baird and Chris Vance launched Washington Independents, a political action committee dedicated to supporting centrist candidates for office, they carried with them an optimistic, hopeful view of American voters and the American political system. Which is kind of like believing the Mariners are going to win the World Series.
Last week, Baird and Vance suspended the PAC’s operations. “It didn’t work; we were wrong,” Vance told The Seattle Times.
Which probably says more about the depressing state of politics than it does about Baird and Vance. Baird is a former congressman who represented Southwest Washington for 12 years as a Democrat; Vance is a former state Republican Party chair who ran against Patty Murray for the U.S. Senate in 2016 and left his party to become an independent the following year.
As two reasonable men, they are strong candidates to help bring a polarized electorate together. But, as two reasonable men, they are hopelessly misplaced in today’s political landscape.
During last year’s midterm elections, Washington Independents supported three candidates for the Legislature. All lost, and two of them received less than 10 percent of the vote in the primary. No independent, according to The Seattle Times, has been elected to the Washington Legislature since 1889.
It’s no secret that independents or third-party candidates have a difficult time garnering support. Even in the digital age, when citizens have a metric ton of information at their fingertips, most voters simply wait until Election Day and mark the ballot based on the “R” or the “D” next to a candidate’s name.
And it’s no secret that the traditional parties are inching farther and farther apart. Oh, they’re both still relatively centrist on the vast political spectrum, but the divide continues to grow. As analyst Lee Drutman put it for Vox.com a couple years ago, “In the 1950s, for example, the party system was like a faucet that produced only varying kinds of warm water.” Now the political temperature ranges from hot to scalding.
Americans often declare that they desire bipartisanship and that they are of an independent mind. According to Pew Research Center, 38 percent of U.S. adults say they are politically independent. But of that 38 percent, nearly all say they lean to one side or the other, and Pew concludes, “Independents who lean to one of the two parties are often much closer to partisans in their views than they are to independents who lean to the other party.” Notably, Pew found, most of the 7 percent who are independent are simply not politically engaged.
In other words, few of us are truly independent, but many of us like to say that we are. Open-mindedness, in some circles, still is considered a virtue.
And it should be. Neither side has a monopoly on good ideas or good candidates. In five years of interviewing candidates for partisan positions ranging from county council to U.S. Senate, I have met both Democrats and Republicans who clearly are the superior candidate for a particular race.
But we digress; the issue here is independent candidates, and that brings us to the United States’ political system.
System failing us
For years, I have argued that one benefit of the Electoral College is that it entrenches the two-party system. Requiring a presidential candidate to win the vote in a state ensures that the parties build large coalitions rather than finding virtue in garnering 20 or 30 or 40 percent.
Now, that two-party system is failing us. The division between the parties has moved from questions of policy to very different views of what constitutes political purity. In the process, that has disenfranchised a huge swath of people who prefer common ground. And it is only going to grow more damaging until this nation embraces a third and a fourth and a fifth major political party.
Baird and Vance were ready to improve our political system. The problem is that voters weren’t ready for them.
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